Susan McClelland - Journalist

Susan McClelland JOURNALIST – WRITER

The Monument
How a Canadian play is helping victims of the Rwandan genocide open their hearts and minds

Reader's Digest
October 2010

Jacqueline Umubyeyi sits quietly in the corner of the change room in the auditorium at the National University of Rwanda. The 40-year-old’s dark brown eyes are closed. And her head, adorned with a grey scarf that matches her floor-length dress, is resting against the wall. Umubyeyi is moments away from her debut as Mejra in the award-winning Canadian play The Monument, which is being performed in Rwanda’s Arts Azimuts Festival.

“I almost quit during the early days of rehearsals,” she whispers, her eyes still closed. “There are too many memories that I need to push away to get onstage.”

Toronto playwright Colleen Wagner didn’t have any specific war in mind when she penned The Monument in 1993, but the piece hauntingly reflects reality for many in Rwanda. The Monument is about a widow named Mejra who agrees to stay the execution of Stetko, a young man convicted of war crimes he committed when he was 17. In the play, Stetko raped and killed 23 girls, including Mejra’s daughter, Ana. In exchange for granting his freedom, Mejra makes Stetko live with her. He is unaware, however, that she is the mother of one of the girls he murdered and that her goal is to get him to tell her where he hid the bodies. As Mejra says near the end of the play: “There will be medals for the dead soldiers on all sides… Monuments for the generals. What will anyone know about the girls in the forest? They must not be forgotten.”

For Umubyeyi, these words are evocative of her own life. She was 25 when gunmen shot down Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994, triggering a full-blown conflict between that country’s two main ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. The violence included the widespread murders of 800,000 people and heinous sex crimes against women and girls. Umubyeyi’s father was beheaded by génocidaires, the Hutu extremists who carried out the genocide; her pregnant older sister, Marie Louise, was murdered, along with the unborn child; and her 19-year-old sister, Umulisa, was kept as a sex slave by Hutu paramilitary forces after she was discovered hiding in a friend’s home. In a letter she managed to give a friend before she was killed, Umulisa talked about her experiences. “She wrote that she was just too tired to go on,” says Umubyeyi. “She had begged someone, anyone, even the other women held captive in the house, to kill her.” Umubyeyi’s eyes fill with tears. “This play could have been written for me.”

Or for hundreds of thousands of other people in Rwanda. No one was left unscathed in the genocide that reached all corners of the tiny Central African country and lasted more than a hundred days. Rwanda today is littered with mass graves. The killings also prompted one of the worst refugee crises of the 20th century as Rwandans fled to neighbouring countries in search of safety.

Fast-forward to 2009. Performing a Canadian play might seem like the least likely or necessary activity for Rwandans—especially if, as Umubyeyi’s account of playing Mejra showcases, it stirs up painful memories. But it is precisely because of these emotional wounds that Odile Gakire Katesi launched the Arts Azimuts Festival—“to make Rwandan people resilient and to help heal wounds.
“Art should be the mirror of a society. I became convinced that if we had art before the genocide, then what happened would not have happened at the level it did. If our society had been given that mirror to see its ugliness, when people were asked to kill, many would have reacted differently.”
It is for similar reasons that Toronto-based theatre director Jennifer Herszman Capraru founded Isôko, a Canadian-Rwandan theatre company—and staged this production in Rwanda. Capraru is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. “I am a generation removed from what Rwan-dans are experiencing today,” says Capraru, “but I was raised by a mother who provided me with a very strong example of overcoming what she had gone through. Working with Rwandan artists was the final step in working towards a reconciliation of what happened to my own family.”

As Capraru describes it, the play deals with the lasting effects of war crimes on a population. “Women, children and the nameless soldiers pay the price,” she says. “The Monument relays to the audience the experiences of both the victim and the perpetrator.”

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This is not Capraru’s first time in Rwanda. In 2006, she worked as a script supervisor here for the film Shake Hands With the Devil, based on the story of Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who was head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda when the genocide occurred. Capraru learned then about the country’s fledgling art community.

A year later, she returned to Kigali to work at the Rwanda Cinema Centre. Capraru gathered a few actors and staged readings of The Monument in French and English. “I wanted to see the reaction of the audience: Was the play too difficult, too soon, too traumatic? Or would it generate discussions on the nature of war, forgiveness and healing?” She did not have to wait long to find out, she says. “The feedback was overwhelming: I had to do a full production.”

Armed with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, Capraru returned to Rwanda in 2008 to begin casting the lead characters, Mejra and Stetko. A lithe 25-year-old named Jean Paul Uwayezu impressed Capra-ru. During his audition, he spat out these words, which are part of Stetko’s opening monologue: “We went to the prison camps about every three days after that and would pick out women, and we’d all do it, then drive them out to the forest. We’d rape them again, then kill them.”

“His eyes were piercing. He was full of emotion. I knew he was Stetko,” says Capraru.

Uwayezu has not found the role an easy one to play. “Stetko represents the génocidaire: the most hated, vile creature in all of Rwanda,” he says. “When I agreed to take the part, a very close friend of mine wouldn’t talk to me for two months.”

Uwayezu, who was only 11 at the time of the genocide, understands her sentiments. He is Tutsi. His older brother was murdered by génocidaires and the family of nine children was separated and sent to live in different parts of the country.

In The Monument, Stetko’s role shows how modern warfare turns innocent young men into perpetrators of violence—young men fed drugs and propaganda and ordered to do acts they never would consider in civil society. When playwright Colleen Wagner first wrote Stetko’s opening monologue, she tore up the page, thinking he was too awful. “I found this character despicable,” she says. “But I grew to love Stetko as I wrote him. He is the boy next door who becomes a murderer.”

At the end of The Monument, Stetko reveals where he buried the 23 girls he killed. In the final scene, Mejra hugs the girls’ soiled dresses, including her daughter’s, and weeps. She then tells Stetko he can go. “I’m sorry,” Stetko whispers to her, then reaches a hand out towards her. She, in turn, makes a move towards Stetko. The lights dim. The play ends.

Following each performance, the audience is invited to stay to talk about the play. Much of the conversation centres on whether or not that final gesture indicates that Mejra forgives Stetko. Such dialogue isn’t unusual: The Rwandan government, as well as numerous charities, conduct reconciliation programs between victims and perpetrators. The conclusion of The Monument is left, like the reconciliation programs, open-ended.

“Between Mejra and Stetko’s outstretched hands there is a space: Rwanda is trying to move through that space. People are asking themselves, can I forgive?” says Capraru. “This is what the arts can do: open a door to the mind and heart, and open a space for dialogue.”

Jacqueline Umubyeyi is figuring this out for herself, too. She will not attend Rwanda’s village court of law, the Gacaca, where the man who killed her pregnant sister will testify to his crimes. “I can’t go,” she says. “One day, maybe, I’ll be able to face the real Stetkos in Rwanda. Right now, I explore these emotions only through acting Mejra’s role.”

Reprinted with permission from the September 2009 magazine.